Leave Her to Heaven

There once was a time when a Hollywood hit and its Hong Kong remake was like the sun and its shadow, never too far apart. Heaven, a blackest noir and a populist romantic, family drama all rolled into one, provides a treasure trove of possibilities for genre criticism and feminist studies. Gene Tierney played the fatalest of femmes whose obsessive love of her husband, a dead ringer for her deceased father, degenerates into insane jealousy: impassively watching her disabled brother-in-law drown, aborting her unborn child whom she thinks of as a love rival… Filmed contrastingly in rich saturated technicolour (which won an Oscar for best colour cinematography), this noir thriller defies all conventions with its subversion of gender roles, middle-class values and moral standards, not least the mismatch between its gorgeous surface – pristine, dreamy landscapes, warm and soft light – and its sinister undertone. The film's title is drawn from Shakespeare's Hamlet, in the scene during which the Ghost urges Hamlet not to seek vengeance against Queen Gertrude. A masterpiece of the eerie and fantastic for the likes of Almodóvar and Todd Haynes to follow.
Print courtesy of Academy Film Archive

Date	Time	Venue
25/2/2017 (Sat)#	7:30pm	Cinema, Hong Kong Film Archive

# Post-screening talk with Lau Yam

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